


this is the in-between

by sodiumflare



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-31 08:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8570728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodiumflare/pseuds/sodiumflare
Summary: You are always dying somewhere.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I swear the spacing's actually on purpose.

Somewhere, you are dying in a wooded glen, brained by a tire iron. But in front of you, Blue is eating pistachio gelato and fencing with Chainsaw, who is holding a plastic knife in her beak and waving it around exactly like how you'd expect anything raised by Ronan to. The bird whines, and Blue whines back. _Communing with the beastie_ , Gansey whispers, and Adam cracks a smile, a little less bruised around the edges than usual, and if you concentrate very hard on this moment, you can almost -

 

A flash of a metal rod, dark against the sky, and then -

 

You are always dying somewhere.

 

\--

 

Blue lets you touch you the way she doesn't let other people touch her (she wants to be touched, you know, but _want_ and _will_ are different things. You know this better than most). You card your fingers through her spiky black hair, twist a lock through your fingers, secure it with a barrette, just like -

 

\- Did you have sisters? You had a sister. You _did_. But it's getting harder to tell, sometimes.

 

\--

 

 _You can't keep secrets from the dead_ , Maura doesn't say, but would say, if she knew to. She doesn't know what you are yet, the strange blind spot at her daughter's side. With Blue, you're almost real. Almost alive. Almost corporeal. Almost.

 

\--

 

Somewhere, bits of your skull are embedded in your brain. The brain doesn't have nerves, which is how those Egyptian surgeons did surgeries without anesthetic, you know. Aglionby produces a prodigious number of trivia bowl winners. You could have been one of them. Whelk was -

 

\- a swish and a thud and then -

 

\--

 

You can see the vines under Adam's skin the same way you can feel the roots slowly wrapping around your ribs, crushing bone as your sweater rots away, beneath the earth. There are thorns in his bones.

 

It's not _quite_ the same thing. But. It's almost like kinship.

 

\--

 

Ronan is hammering together plywood in the lot outside Monmouth, nails clamped between his teeth and a skateboard waiting in the half-mowed grass. You used to like to skateboard, you think - you and -

 

\--

 

\- throwing yourself through a windshield -

 

\--

 

You were the one who found Ronan, yes, and then got Gansey, because that's what you will always do in a crisis (death recognizes death, and also kings). But you know what Ronan was trying to kill. He knows what he was trying to kill. You think of the crucifix on his bedroom wall, of brothers in a row at St. Agnes, of delicate truces on sacred ground. The death and the rebirth. But Ronan doesn't know you know, and the dead don't tell secrets. Not even the really important ones. Not even that you know that Adam wakes up thinking of Ronan sometimes, wakes up _hard_ , because you have a room at Monmouth but you're everywhere, really. Even places you don't want to be. You don't tell him, it's not your secret, and it's not like you chose -

 

\--

 

You attached to Gansey because you knew Blue would find him eventually, is always finding him eventually, magnetic filings drawing closer together from across the lines - and because you _like_ Gansey. It's impossible not to, the Platonic ideal of a Raven boy, aristocracy made flesh. He is the most any boy ever could be, and you are the least a boy can be, and you were like him once, and somewhere, he's dying like you.

 

\--

 

You didn't _choose_ to know any of this: to know about your cheekbone fractured under your eye, bony splinters protruding like matchsticks, the sound of skin tearing, your heartbeat falling out like a top wobbling on its axis -

 

\--

 

You didn't choose --

 

\--

 

From Blue's face,  you can tell you're dying in front of her _again_ , frost creeping down the windows and up your spine and you crumple like cardboard doused in gasoline, and from somewhere a _hiss_ and a hint of sulfur and you think for a moment of Ronan's dreams, and Blue _screams_ -

 

\--

 

Despite everything, you're _mostly_ best at being a person when Blue's around, and in a moment of weakness, she agrees to let Gansey take you all to the fair. She and Ronan share a funnel cake, and a goat jumps on Adam at a petting zoo, and Gansey's sort of green when he staggers off the tilt-a-whirl (not as green-tinged as he will be, you know, and you stuff the thought back down where it belongs -). Ronan wins a giant stuffed bear at the skeet shoot and hands it to Blue, who promptly pawns it off on a tiny girl staring at Chainsaw with wide-eyed adoration. There is straw beneath your feet and cotton candy stuck to your fingers and you suspect you have a kool-aid grin from the sno cone. You _almost_ have a hint of hay fever from the pony rides, and the sun is warm on your back -

 

\--

 

Somewhere a bird is pecking at your eyes and your organs are liquefying and worms are twisting through your rotting insides - but Gansey is haloed in the late afternoon light, and Chainsaw has hopped off Ronan's shoulder to sample Adam's funnel cake and Blue's body glitter glistens like speckled stars on her cheeks, and in this moment, you are the most alive you have ever been.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title ganked from Siken's "Dislocated Room": 
> 
>  
> 
> _Here is the hallway and here are the doors and here is the fear of the_  
>  _other thing, the relentless_  
>  _thing, your body drowning in gravity._  
>  _This is the in-between, the waiting that happens in the_  
>  _space between_  
>  _one note and the next, the place where you confuse_  
>  _his hands with the room, the dog_  
>  _with the man, the blood_  
>  _with the ripped-up sky._


End file.
